We wanted to post a quick note on our blog to mention to all that at Microsoft Ignite 2017 we have announced that we will be releasing Exchange Server 2019 as an on-premises release to our customers.

We are looking forward to sharing more details about this release with you in calendar year (CY) 2018. We expect to release a preview in mid CY 2018 with the final release near the end of CY 2018. Please review our TAP program post, as we will be looking for more customers to help us validate this release!

That seems like a very "small business" mindset comment. My question would be, how many large customers are 100% in the cloud, if any. How many customers are even a large percentage in the cloud. I don't think Microsoft realizes what a financial disaster having Exchange available ONLY in the cloud without any on-premise solution would be to them... because people would just migrate to some other email system which allows on-prem.

Agree completely, even for small business the only way to really get reliable SMTP relay functionality is a hybrid scenario. For a large enterprise, even the ones that are hosting their mailboxes in the cloud, most are running a Centralized Mail Transport setup, for archiving, compliance, etc. Microsoft has always understood that one size/product doesn't fit all. Let's hope they don't forget that.

The phrasing "we will be releasing Exchange Server 2019 as an on-premises release" is a little odd. Why announce you are going to continue doing something you've always done? Less suspicious wording would be "Exchange 2019 is slated for release near the end of 2018." Imagine if GM announced "we have decided to continue selling cars in 2018."

As mentioned above security and many organisations have legal requirements to consider, data cannot reside in a different country.

Office 365 is hugely expensive when considering that many organisations only upgrades every second 2010 to 2016 for example, trying to cope with continuality upgrades to office and get it to function with numerus other programs we are running is a monumental task when you have to do it every 6 month or so.

buddy Whats your Problem with on-premise Servers Boxes.(Cloud Means Public_and its true and nobody can change it) i really love to see Black and steel color boxes around me with different wire category with blinking lights and of-course smooth and sexy sound like (1) Starting Sound 2) Lode UP sound and 3) restart Sonund) (Zooooooommmm , Huusuuuuussssssss, yaaaaaahaaaauuuu), dont you like. What kind of IT person you are,

There is a side benefit to releasing exchange on prem... that is, it enables IT pro's to familiarize themselves with the product that is running in MSFT's datacenter (Exchange Online aka o365). How else would people be able to work for them one day if they don't have products available to the public lol.

Lastly, I could see exchange server becoming just Exchange Server and them dropping the year, and streamlining features via an enrollment process. That'd be nice.

I wonder if an early release of Exchange 2019 is already running in O365 because Get-MoveRequestStatistics reports "TargetVersion : Version 15.20 (Build 77.0)" or "TargetVersion : Version 15.20 (Build 156.0)".

We are running a hosting company offering Hosted Exchange, we use MachPanel for customer self service, we have option to limit number of users on particular Database or dedicate a database to a customer. Also it is easy to Move mailboxes between databases using Group Actions.

please lord no, we just moved to exchange 2016 and the head banging has been nothing if not monumental, were using onsite and linking with OneDrive for Document Collaboration has been well frankly impossible, a whole load of functionality was removed in 2016 what will 2019 be like, I sorry but we need time to heal.

I am all for on-prem. The Exchange Online is not cloud (virtualization) . It is SaaS. It has many regulatory shortcomings and is more costly to sustain for medium-sized and large businesses with large mailbox and realtime access to retired mailbox data. Also, good luck with managing backups. Overall, it costs more to run Exchange Online using full enterprise contigencies than on prem.

Oh god. This post means that at some point in the future, it won't be on premise software. Jesus god no. If that happens I'm leaving IT. I'm getting my forklift license and working in a warehouse for the rest of my life. I've already transitioned to mostly network engineering because of this kind of garbage. It all started when MS cut off TechNet. The moment they did that, I bought a couple books and got my CCNA about two months later. I guess I have to give Microsoft credit for not being at all subtle that if you're still invested in a career based on their technology, you're going to be out of a job before Trump is.